The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

TEN-STORY JIGSAW by Brian W. Aldiss

The wider range and subtler definition of subject matter in modern s-f makes, I think, for better reading—but much more complex anthologizing.

Time was when the editor of a collection such as this could sit down and sort out the stories into tidy piles under such subheadings as Space Travel, Time Travel, Planetary Adventure, Marvelous Invention, Alien Visitors, Mutation, Atom Doom, and the like.

Presumably this could still be done. The space ships, inventions, and mutations are still there—but that’s not what the stories are about. The end result would be only to multiply confusion. If I used subheadings here, the two main ones would have to be: Whither Civilization? and Inside Man.

One of the old labels would still fit, though—Atom Doom —and the next three stories could be grouped under it. The first of them is the work of a young British author who has only recently begun to appear in print in this country.

The time: After World War III.

The place: Sydney, Australia.

The hero: A junkman.

My name is Badger Gowland. It’s an ordinary sort of name for an ordinary sort of bloke. For the past twenty years I’ve worked as scrap merchant in this big, war-torn city. The city happens to be Sydney, but I suppose that, with minor variations, what I’m going to tell you might have happened in any war-torn city: Singapore, New York, Hamburg, Moscow, London. In that twenty years, I’ve come across many strange stories, but the strangest is that of Tosher Ten-Toes. Tosher was my cobbler. Here’s his story, and you’ll have to take it as it is, without frills.

This particular morning, the last morning of Tosher’s life, there was something vague about him. He was preoccupied. I spotted it even in the way he came toward me when he came to work, but thought nothing of it at the time. His amnesia made him like that at times, and all the lads were used to it and thought nothing of it.

“Come on, Tosher!” I shouted. “The other scrap gangs have already left. Time we were moving.”

I was seated in the helicart, waiting to go. He scrambled up beside me apologetically. I let in the clutch, the vanes began to spin above us and up we went. Helicarts are absolutely silent in action; we might have been birds, the way we took the air.

It was a fine, warm spring day with air as still as syrup, just the sort of day for our job. The enemy raid over the city the night before had been chicken feed—a paltry couple of satellite-to-Earth squadrons of Depressors dropping a few “suitcases.” “Suitcases” are what we call the light type of H-bombs that Depressors generally carry: small stuff equivalent to not more than eighty thousand tons T.N.T. The best thing about them from our point of view is that they’re clean—no R.A. fall-out—and so we don’t have the bother of cluttering ourselves with anti-suits while we are salvaging.

Directly the raid was over, I had phoned through to Civil Maintenance and bought a couple of freshly damaged ten-story buildings cheap. They stood fairly close together on George’s Heights, looking out across Obelisk Bay and the sea. I slid the co-ordinates into the cyberpilot now and we were away. Tosher pulled his wind-cheater off and stowed it in the locker, just to show he was all set for action.

In the sunshine, the city looked good from the air. Neat. Even the beggars starving in the gutters look tidy when you’re a couple of hundred yards up. A bright, early-flowering weed lent a touch of gaiety to the craters among the buildings. The waters of the port shone like brass.

“What have we got today, Badger?” Tosher asked.

“A tenner with courtesy and a jigsaw tenner,” I said. Those are just the cant terms we use in the trade. A building “with courtesy” means some sort of Government office block—if you get courtesy from them, you get precious little else. A “jigsaw” is private flats or homes; we call them that because when they are busted open they look like a pattern of interlocking pieces—like a smashed dolly house.

In no time we were circling over our new property. Good slices of both of them were still standing. Far below, the demolition squads were busy roping off the area. They always move in and blow up the unsafe buildings after we have paid our brief salvage visits. “The vultures” is what they call us; I won’t tell you what we call them. They grudge us an honest living. Yet what we scrap lads pay the civic authorities pays those chaps’ wages. Besides, with all raw materials in short supply owing to the war, we are valuable members of the community—all that sort of bunk!

“My turn for out,” Tosher said, casting round for his gear.

I had leveled out close to the ten-story jigsaw, holding the helicart steady against the ruined top floor. We always work from the top down. And we always do the jigsaws first because they are more exciting; you never know what you’re going to find. In a courtesy job, it’s all cut and dried: so many desks, so many wash basins, so many lavatory bowls. After a time, a good scrap man—like me or Tosher —can fillet a courtesy with our eyes shut.

Anyhow, Tosher strapped his tool haversack on his back, slung one end of the pulley system over his shoulder, and stepped out onto the upper story of the doomed building. I climbed out the back of my cab into the helicart platform and set up the other end of the pulley tackle. By that means, we transfer the booty into our flying pantechnicon.

Then I sat back, lit a mescahale, and waited for Tosher to reconnoiter and do his stuff. I forgot to tell you why we call him Tosher Ten-Toes.

It started as a joke. The war had hardly begun, nine years ago, when Tosher appeared near my house in a dazed condition. Nothing on but pants and vest and half a shirt; barefoot. Speechless. Total amnesia. There were a lot of poor devils about like that when the raids started. I was short of hands in the yard at the time; my missus and I took Tosher in and looked after him. Tosher Ten-Toes was what the kids called him. You know what kids are: they think it’s funny to see a man walk barefoot down Portobello Street.

Tosher began to get better. I got busier as the raids increased. In no time, he was off the yard and working second man in the helicarts. Now for the last four years he was my right-hand man. He might not have had a lot to say, but I wouldn’t have changed him for all the you-know-what in China. He still did not know who he was, but that began to trouble him less and less. Nothing of the old days had come back to him, except the memory of Judy. Not that Tosher knew who Judy was, it was just that he used to wake up in the night crying her name. He was faithful to her name, wouldn’t look at another woman, not even at Kate, who often looked at him.

Fixing up his end of the pulley, he stood and surveyed the ruined jigsaw. It was in a poor way. Half of it had been sliced into dust, and the foundations were undermined. Spreading his legs, Tosher began to rock from side to side; as he gained momentum, the building began to rock from side to side with him. He killed the motion at once. “Thank heaven there’s no wind about,” he said to himself.

He was standing in what had been till a few hours ago an attic box-room. Against the inner wall, four empty trunks were piled. Without bothering to use the pulley system, he threw them over into the hold of the helicart. Nobody had the raw materials to waste on making trunks now; they were scarce and would be worth about six hundred apiece.

Without wasting any time, but moving cautiously, he went to the door and opened it. Outside were stairs, winding down to the floor below. A quarter way down, just past the first bend, the outer wall had been blasted away, leaving the stairs sagging over emptiness. Stepping carefully on the inside of the treads, Tosher came down onto the next floor.

All the walls on the landing were intact—curtains undisturbed round the landing window, just a little white dust over the ornament on the sill. No doubt Tosher felt that feeling you always feel, that you’ve no right to be there, that you’re an intruder, or a burglar, or perhaps a vulture, or a ghost.

Ahead of him, a notice on a door said “Flat 26.” The door was locked. Tosher brought out a bunch of skeleton keys, undid it, and went in.

He was in a living room. Everything was perfectly intact. It was the usual sort of middle-class flat; we deal with them by the dozen. Tosher made a rapid inventory of the salable items: stove, TV, tape player, carpet, newish suite, clock, nice little china figure. The rest of the stuff, the paperbacks, yesterday’s newspaper, the pictures on the wall, a big golliwog slumped over the arm of a chair, would tumble with the jigsaw when the demolition men took over. Later, maybe, kids would crawl over the rubble and pull a comic or a little toy out of it.

“Something like twenty-five thousand credits here,” Tosher estimated, jotting the figure down and opening the next door.

He was in the bathroom. It was a nice, roomy bathroom with green tiles all round it and a deep ebony bath and pink and yellow towels on towel rails and a great big airing cupboard. You know. A bit Ritzy. The sort of place that makes you hanker after a bath yourself. One wall had entirely fallen away. Tosher walked to the edge of the precipice and looked down. The bathroom protruded over space, with only the breezes for support. Obviously, he need not waste much time there.

And then, the way I see it, something came over Tosher. Perhaps he suddenly saw in that bathroom the complete futility of war. He thought of everyone who had been killed, from Vic Shepherd, the great comedian, to the lowliest unknown; he thought even of Norton Sykes, the minister they called The Man Who Started It All, whose hideout had ironically been the first to be destroyed in the war he began —perhaps even of my sister Kate, who at one time set out in a practical way to get Judy out of Tosher’s mind and later was killed by a Winged Wallaby, so-called.

Tosher must have seen it all in that bathroom: the way in war you’re busy doing something ordinary one minute and the next—bingo!—you’re in Kingdom Come. Norton Sykes crouching over his battle plans or my sister Kate hanging out her smalls—when the time comes, they all go like that. That’s how it had been in the bathroom too. A nice place and a nice life spoilt forever.

The little glass shelf over the wash basin was cluttered with powder tins, shaving tackle, tooth brushes, and other paraphernalia. On the stool next to the black bath were a child’s pajamas. There was water in the bath; on the water floated a becalmed yacht and two rubber ducks.

It all told its own story. Death comes at bedtime—it sounds like the title of a cheap novel. Everything there looked perfectly in order, except that the big airing-cup-board door was partly open and a woolly bath towel had fallen out; and a tooth glass had teetered off the shelf and shattered in the wash basin. But with the outer wall gone, all those indoor objects looked unreal in the outdoor lighting, as if they were something on a tele or a movie set.

Then Tosher saw another detail. On the edge of the lino, by the sheer drop, was a bloody hand print. The fingers pointed into the room. The print was smudged where the hand had slid over the edge and into the gulf. It had been just a small hand. “My God!” Tosher said.

You could picture it all. Mother about to bath son. Water in the bath and everything. “I think I’d better wash your hair tonight, dear.” Then the Depressors pulling out of their two-hundred-mile dive and screeching off, leaving their suitcases behind. The detonation, and the wall whipped away like a curtain. Blast probably sucked mother out with the wall. Son was bowled to the brink of the ninety-foot drop. He was injured. For a minute he clung there, body dangling in air, perhaps not even struggling to get back to safety.

He hung there and looked at the old order, the soft, warm towels, his little pajamas, the steam rising from the tub. Then he had to let go.

Tosher turned wildly. He began cursing aloud. He cursed the war that killed the kid and blotted out Judy and his own past; he cursed Norton Sykes, who started the war; he cursed the generals who continued the war; he even cursed me, who made a profit out of the war. Then he cursed himself most of all.

He wrenched a crowbar out of his kit and smashed the mirror on the wall so that he could no longer see his own distorted face. He flicked the plug out of the bath; the water gurgled out, splashing over a piano standing forlornly on a ledge which had once been the floor below. Then he hurled the crowbar away.

He watched the metal glint as it fell lazily over and over, finally to strike the pavement far below; and when he turned back, the towel by the cupboard door was moving.

For a minute Tosher did not understand. Then the towel was dragged aside. A woman was there on the floor, on her hands and knees. Clutching the door, she stood up. She was in her early forties, disheveled, still with a waterproof apron tied round her middle. It was the boy’s mother. The blast, flinging her into the airing cupboard, had knocked her senseless, and there she had lain till the row Tosher made had roused her.

The sight of her petrified Tosher for a minute.

“I thought you were a ghost!” he said hoarsely.

The woman brushed a hand over her forehead.

“Why aren’t you in the bath yet, Mickie?” she asked in a puzzled fashion.

“It’s all right now, you’re safe now,” he said, recovering from his first fright. “We’ll soon have you out of here.”

Her gaze went right through him.

“The bath water’s getting cold while you just stand there,” she said.

“You’re a bit dazed, my dear,” said Tosher, in a gentle voice. “Here, look, let me—”

“I asked you to get undressed, didn’t I?” she said. She sounded rational enough, but her eyes—they were as black as prunes and stared unseeingly through Tosher. “Hurry up and get your clothes off, Mickie, or the water will be stone cold.”

“I’m not your little boy,” Tosher said. “Something— something’s happened. Try and understand. Let me take care of you.”

“Don’t argue, Mickie,” she said sharply. “Get undressed quickly. It’s nearly time for Daddy to come home.”

“Mickie isn’t here!” Tosher explained desperately. “I’ve come to get you out of this, old pet.”

“You must have your bath first,” she shouted. There was a bruise on her temple like mud under the skin where she had clouted herself against the airing-cupboard door. “It’s getting late,” she said.

“Can’t you see—” Tosher began, gesturing to the little yacht lying on its side in the bath. But he knew she could not understand; the poor creature was not rational.

If he could get her upstairs, the helicart would take her to hospital for treatment. Advancing he laid a hand on the woman’s wrist. With unexpected force, she flung herself onto him. She pounced like a wild cat and began to rip the clothes off his back.

“Get undressed! Get undressed!” she yelled. “You must have your bath, you dirty little scamp!”

Tosher staggered back, putting his hand up to her throat to push her off him. With a quick movement, she bit his fingers till the blood came.

“Into the bath!” she screamed. “Quick! Quickly! Your ducks and boats are waiting for you!”

Under the prod of pain, Tosher acted instinctively. He chopped her under the nose with the edge of his palm and then, when her head was still jerked backward, pushed hard against her chest. She came away from him.

“Your bath . . .” she began surprisedly.

Just for a moment she was balanced on the brink of the drop. Tosher stepped forward to grab her. Their fingers touched. Then she was falling backward, outward, her mouth fixed in an astonished, silent, “Oh!”

Helplessly, Tosher just stood there and watched her fall. Her round mouth and her puzzled expression—as if this were some problem she could solve, given another five minutes—were vividly clear to him. And in that instant he recognized her.

“Judy!” he called. Just that one call.

And the round mouth of her, fixed, dwindling in the center of his vision, changed suddenly into an expanding hole, growing rounder, bigger, bigger yet. It was swallowing, vaporizing away the barrier that stood between Tosher and his past. The sight of Judy had finally vanquished his nine-year amnesia.

Standing there on the edge of nothing, Tosher could at last see back into his lost life. A figure was standing there. It was Norton Sykes, The Man Who Started It All, the man who had vanished when the first load of enemy suitcases fell on his hideout. Tosher recognized Norton’s figure: it was himself.

“Me . . . Norton . . .” he muttered and then, aloud in an oddly conversational tone, “but I don’t want to be Norton.”

And he took a pace forward into thin air.

Most of this I saw with my own two eyes. Directly I heard Tosher breaking the mirror, I guessed something was wrong. In rocky jigsaws, we scrap chaps are always as silent as mice.

All I had to do was drop the helicart down one story and angle it round one corner. I did it in a hurry, and the pulley system snagged me. In my haste, I had forgotten it still connected me with the attic.

Rather than flip the crate up again to disconnect, I snatched up my welder and jumped back onto the platform to burn the steel pulley cable through and thus release the helicart. It took a hell of a time. The welder wouldn’t function properly and my hands were shaking as if I had palsy.

I was stuck half round the corner, helpless. I could see Tosher and the woman from where I was, but couldn’t get to them. I shouted, but they didn’t look. When the cable finally gave, I was just too late to catch Tosher as he fell.

The terrible thing was, that woman wasn’t Judy any more than I am. I checked afterward. It was just a delusion of poor old Tosher’s. But of course he was—or had been— Norton Sykes. I’d found that out years ago. All the boys in the yard knew, but they never let on. Nor did they ever hold it against him, although as Norton Sykes, Tosher had been a virtual dictator.

It’s an odd world. A dictator can make a damn good scrap man. And vice versa, unfortunately.